February 18, 2007

"Supporting" Our Troops

While the Republicants shamelessly tried to argue yesterday that Democrats don't support the troops with comments like this one:

“We want a debate about Iraq that includes funding for the troops,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “They’ve denounced the surge. The question is, are they going to fund the troops?”

...they conveniently ignored the fact that it is they, the people in charge during the majority of this war, not the Democrats, who have underfunded our troops:

"After General Pace rendered inoperative the first official rationale for last Sunday’s E.F.P. (explosively formed penetrators) briefing, President Bush had to find a new explanation for his sudden focus on the Iranian explosives. That’s why he said at Wednesday’s news conference that it no longer mattered whether the Iranian government (as opposed to black marketeers or freelance thugs) had supplied these weapons to Iraqi killers. “What matters is, is that they’re there,” he said. The real point of hyping this inexact intelligence was to justify why he had to take urgent action now, no matter what the E.F.P.’s provenance: “My job is to protect our troops. And when we find devices that are in that country that are hurting our troops, we’re going to do something about it, pure and simple.”

Darn right! But if the administration has warned about these weapons twice in the past 18 months (and had known “that they’re there,” we now know, since 2003), why is Mr. Bush just stepping up to that job at this late date? Embarrassingly enough, The Washington Post reported on its front page last Monday — the same front page with news of the Baghdad E.F.P. briefing — that there is now a shortfall of “thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs.” Worse, the full armor upgrade “is not scheduled to be completed until this summer.” So Mr. Bush’s idea of doing something about it, “pure and simple” is itself a lie, since he is doing something about it only after he has knowingly sent a new round of underarmored American troops into battle. "